The Hair of Harold Roux (37 page)

He finds a clean cotton shirt and some untorn pants, cleans the unfortunate squashed bugs from the lenses of his glasses. Soon he is beneath his humid crash helmet in the garage, trying to find neutral—any of the three possible places where the Honda will be in neutral and will start. Finally, with a lugging and a crunch of the delicate gears, he is off down his driveway, numb here and there but in general feeling that his articulate minions, his good crew, will get him through the campus to the somewhat decaying building, moldering sedately beneath its ivy, that is the dark center from which the English Department, whatever that is, insidiously spreads its tentacles around the tender, overly receptive brains of what was once our pride and our hope, our youth. Perhaps he shouldn’t go; the water has got to his flotation chamber after all—that gray, soapy water mildly chemicaled by some of Agnes’ bath oil beads. Is that why he feels so slippery?

It is not that he dislikes his fellow senior members, those who have been graced with tenure, those eminences beginning to gray or wholly gray or white (strangely, none are bald) who can without any mnemonic devices tell immediately
whether the sixteenth century is actually the fifteen hundreds, the sixteen hundreds or the seventeen hundreds.

When he arrives they are there behind the closed door of the chairman’s office. The two and one-half secretaries smile at him, the one-half secretary referred to this way because she works half time. There are one-half assistant professors who are there full time, he always has to think when he looks at the one-half secretary, who is actually a pretty girl, as bilaterally symmetrical as one could wish. He takes his mail in with him to read during lulls. Not lulls of talk, for his colleagues can talk forever, but lulls of emotional tension. He is nodded to, an eyebrow is raised (he is on leave, is he not?) and he finds a chair.

Forty-five minutes later the subject of George Buck comes up. It is not that Aaron hasn’t been listening; these men are really no more digressively verbose than any others, nor do they enjoy the sounds of their own voices more than men of any station. They are, if anything, more precise, more intelligent than most, and their ambitions are no more nakedly egocentric. Perhaps a certain intensity of moral fervor can at times make them ruthless or cruel, but often the same fervor causes them to make judgments that are moral. Why expect from professors an Olympian objectivity beyond that of ordinary men when one has, no doubt, once taken a course in ancient Greek mythology in which one found out all about Zeus? And, after all, these men have reached their august positions through competition—grinding, eye-blearing competition—with other ambitious and intelligent men.

Well, this isn’t exactly true in all cases, but what is? Aaron is listening. Perhaps the most fervently moral, those whose standards of teaching and scholarship are impeccably rigid, are those whose work hasn’t progressed very well for the last ten years or so. But he won’t generalize in this area, either.

There are ten men sitting in the chairman’s spacious office. Their styles of clothes and hair vary according to their (comparative) youth, their convictions concerning fashion,
politics, student
Gemütlichkeit
, or having to get along with local, nonuniversity artisans and officials. He notices that the student representative, who has been duly elected to this body, is absent. And there are no women, but several female junior members look promising enough so that this sexist segregation will most likely be broken soon. There are also two junior member blacks, one of whom is definitely on his way in unless he is grabbed by Harvard.

But this tone, Aaron has to think, is not exactly fair. How easy it is to caricature these colleagues of his, to feel superior. Professors are either revered or despised, according to the age. But there is X’s strange involuntary smirk, Y’s sly attempt to sound like an honest, candid, good old country boy, Z’s Rhodes scholar accent which is entangled glottally with the Down Maine inflections of his childhood, W’s slightly off renditions of not quite current student jargon (“Outasight!”), V’s prissy, pursed lips and bow ties, U’s ostentatious annotating of a Latin text all during the meeting, S’s constant complaints that the students don’t work any more, have no standards, don’t care about anything (who, during the Cambodia-Kent State spring was so frightened by their caring about that issue he was pale and speechless for several weeks). A strange set of perfectly normal, ordinary men, as honest as most, most of them Aaron’s friends, none of whom he really dislikes.

The arguments over George Buck’s case will proceed along certain lines. Those to whom published scholarship is not and never has been their strong suit, who in fact sometimes sneer at the value of the Ph.D., including their own, will support George wholeheartedly, citing student evaluations of his classes, his personality, his fairness, his “feedback” and so on. Those, on the other hand, who have the glory of the departmental Ph.D. degree in mind, will point out that even if George does manage to get his degree he will probably never do scholarship—visible, published scholarship, that is —and so will never be a candidate for tenure. If, in effect, we give him more time, all we are doing is putting off an inevitable
and much more traumatic firing of the man two years hence.

Are we going to reward good teaching at this institution or not? asks group number one.

We should reward good teaching, of course, answers group number two, but good teaching along with good scholarship.

Publish or Perish! a member of group number one says, and suggests that what with all the wordy, irrelevant, feather-splitting nonsense the scholarly publications are full of today we should pay these young scholars
not
to publish.

While the argument runs its predictable course, Aaron is silent. His heartbeat seems to him erratic, his palms are sweating. He has descended into that terrible internal place that is too close to the center of the organism. It is the control center, and he’s there with no plan, no directions from the captain. He
is
the captain, and he doesn’t know what to do. So he inhales eighteen cubic feet of poisonous cigarette smoke in one drag, thinking that a better method of suicide would be to open the window of his study that overlooks a blackberry patch, take his shotgun, put the muzzle in his mouth and carefully blow his brains out the window so as not to mess up the house and cause his wife to see unnecessary gore. A gentle summer rain or two and everything will be fine. Having gone over this familiar recipe for immediate, painless, sure-fire extinction, he comes back to George Buck, Helga Buck, and Edward Buck. The fact is that in his own screwed-up, ambivalent way he loves these people, and they, in their much more human and sincere fashion, love him. God knows why.

Group number two is probably right, but it might very well kill George to have to sell his beloved house, to leave his beloved students and move away. And what will that do to Helga and Edward? Their unhappiness is so inevitable. Of course, all this is George’s fault; George is no revolutionary, either, who might have a crusade or such against the present form of the university. He entered upon his job willingly, knowing what was expected of him. He worked himself to
exhaustion at Brown in order to finish his residency requirements, his written and oral examinations. All he has to do is write his dissertation, God damn it! And be interested enough and curious enough and original enough to discover new ideas and share them with his peers via the printed word, God damn it all to hell!

Ah, but these arguments are mere procrastination. All Aaron’s life he has known people, one here, one there, who have given him the supreme gift, the highest, most valuable gift of all, and that is to have redeemed in his eyes the human race. Certainly he cannot find in himself much evidence for the possibility of such grace. Again he thinks that it has always been his role to be stronger and morally inferior to these chosen few.

He has been asked a question. It is Z, the chairman: “Addon, praps you have news of Jawge’s pro-gress tawd the complation of his dis-tation?”

If he could only say how happy he is to report that it will be published by Columbia University Press this fall; that they also plan a series of monographs in pamphlet form on Henry Troy, George to be the general editor of the series, followed by
The Complete Works
. Columbia is also
very
much interested in George’s as yet unfinished book-length manuscript,
Troy-ism as an Aspect of the Age
, and they hope to publish it toward the beginning of next year.

“He says it’s coming along,” Aaron says.

“Ah, but is it?”

“I really don’t know,” he lies.

He thinks: screw this university. Screw all institutions. It is the seed of murder when a man is loyal to anything but another man. But what arguments can you now muster that will change anything? And listen, you compulsive survivor, how much exactly do you need this system, not to mention the check in the warm little green envelope that comes every two weeks? Yes, you are one of the lucky few and could probably live on your writing, but do you feel that you have
all that energy? No, he would not want to take on that nervous risk—not at the moment, anyway.

Aaron, who rarely gets headaches, now has a red-hot ball bearing just under the skin at the back of his head. Or maybe it’s a crunching, vise-turning sort of thing, not heat so much as pressure, so there probably isn’t a column of smoke rising from the back of his head. Whatever it is, it’s real pain.

He remains silent; he does nothing to help his friend. This is the moment a man with any greatness in him would seize. He should speak, jolting them with his emotion, shaping their beliefs with his brilliant clarity and logic, outlining for them a whole new philosophy of their stewardship. He is silent because he has none of these ideas and probably wouldn’t agree with them even if he could get his golden tongue around their invincible sonorities. So he tries to think that, after all, in the end, it will probably be best for George, a favor, really, to …

He is presented with a small blank piece of paper, upon which he will write “yes” if he wants the department to recommend to the dean that George’s deadline be moved forward to January 30, and “no” if he wants it to remain August 30. Of course he will write … what? Why doesn’t he write “yes” and be done with it? He almost writes “no.” Might he write “abstain”? Finally he writes “yes.” The vote is counted and the “noes” win by two votes, a result he exactly knew beforehand.

After a few announcements that Aaron’s on-leave mind safely evades, the meeting is over. W wants him to play squash for an hour but Aaron explains that he fell off his motorcycle and his knee doesn’t work very well today. Maybe in a few days.

He takes his mail down the hall to his office, unlocks the door and dumps the envelopes and brochures on his desk, then quickly sorts them out and puts most of them in the wastebasket. Through his two windows he sees the graceful branches of a heroically surviving elm, an expanse of green
lawn and the stone legend over the library arch: YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE. You shall know the truth and the truth shall drive you up the wall. He doesn’t want to see George. He doesn’t want to see anybody who might want to discuss George’s case, so he leaves.

At home he stalls the Honda again. When he comes out of the garage the cat, across ten yards of grass, stares at him. It has a live, thinking, bright-eyed chipmunk in its teeth. The cat always takes its prey to an open place where it can play out its torture with little chance of the victim’s escape. The cat is wary because at times Aaron, perceiving a common look, a fellow look in the victim’s eyes, goes charging and roaring after the cat, who then grabs the victim and finds another more distant arena. These pleasures must be taken slowly.

This chipmunk has already lost the skin and fur of its tail, the bare red bone naked to the air, each small vertebra plain to the eye. Seeing that it isn’t one of Aaron’s days to charge, the cat lets the chipmunk go. It turns, knowing it can’t get away, and assays a fearsome front by chattering and trying to fluff its skinless tail into a threat. The cat growls and turns away. The chipmunk gets six feet toward an apple tree before a hook enters its abdomen and jerks it back to the delicate teeth that are so careful not to extinguish life, which is what is all the fun. With birds the cat kills more quickly—say after ten minutes of this. Perhaps birds are more delicate, or the cat can’t tell if they are as yet too sick to fly. For its fellow mammals it reserves the longest, most thoughtful deaths.

Janie loves this cat, or this cat wouldn’t be. It is an affectionate, cuddly, nose-touching cat, as endearing as the devil can make himself. That Janie must love this killer, even though she knows its cruelty, hurts Aaron. He can take such truths about life—God knows he has to. But a child? Don’t be so bloody sentimental, he tells himself; it’s as if you can’t remember childhood as it really was. Or anything as it really is. He has found a stone half as big as his fist, and he throws it with all his strength as if to kill the cat he cannot kill. The
stone of course misses the cat, who jumps, takes its live plaything and departs.

Mary and Allard were at Lilliputown. They had come in the afternoon to swim in the rocky pool above the little village. One at a time they had changed into their swimming suits in the nearest cabin—a miniature bungalow on the outside, a room with double bed and bathroom on the inside. Harold decided he had too much paper work to do, so he couldn’t swim with them, but he opened the bungalow and gave them towels before he went back to the Town Hall.

Mary and Allard sat on the ledges in the sun, warming up after their first plunge into the cold pool.

“I wonder if Harold can’t swim because of his wig,” Allard said.

“It’s too bad,” Mary said. “I wonder if he’d be what he’s like now if he didn’t wear it.”

“I wonder what he looks like without it.”

“I don’t think girls care so much about that sort of thing.”

“Well, it’s hard not to feel proud that you’ve got your own real hair,” Allard said, pulling on his.